The present disclosure relates to assistive technology, and more particularly to assistive technology selectively injecting information into a current context in response to a user's cognitive status.
Assistive Technology (AT) includes screen readers, speech-to-text recognition systems, and wearable and other mobile accessibility devices for people with disabilities or specialized needs.
Many applications provide instant user guidance, for example, using the F1 key to invoke a help window, context sensitive tips and the like. Applications also make use of social channels (e.g., forums, blogs or wikis) to share user experiences, for example, in a navigation application that notifies a current user of other users' experiences. The user experiences may be a solution to an issue, a tip, or any kind of assistance to solve a problem, or an instruction to complete a task. The other users' experiences are updated in real time, and may be selectively provided to the current user based on a state of the current user.
Although the shared user experience can be used by both sighted users and screen reader users, the usage scenarios or use experiences are different. Screen readers and other assistive technologies listen for alerts (i.e., role=alert in WAI-ARIA (the Web Accessibility Initiative's Accessible Rich Internet Applications specification)) or events from a current application that provide updated status and messaging information to the user, for example, when a new email arrives or a change in a status. Alerts give information about external applications that are not related to what the user is doing. However, the user must use keyboard input to get the content referenced by the alert or event leaving the context of the current application.